Compressor after drives?

builttospill

Anyone tried this? I think it sounds really good 

PolarityMan

For a heavy drive I feel like it wouldnt really be doing much..the drive is already compressing the signal

Wazmeister

Yes. Works for me....

Fat General after Duellist...

Beexter

Yep, after drives is where my compressor goes. It means I can still clean up the drive from the guitar. 

mgaw

same here compressor after drives

Lewy

Yep, always after drives. When you roll back the guitar volume, your drive cleans up but your volume doesn’t change as much. 

Voxman

I put my compressor before the drives.  My pedalboard follows this approach:

https://www.strymon.net/setting-up-your-effect-signal-chain/

But as stated, there is no 'wrong' way to set up your pedalboard and different approaches give different sonic results. 

Sassafras

Never. It just strangles the sound and compresses far too much for my liking.

Cirrus

I'd say it just depends. With longer attack settings on a compressor, if you're playing a riff that's quite staccato, you can use a compressor to add transient punch at the start of notes - the longer attack makes it more dynamic *with* the compressor. Also, compression after extreme EQ, so, say you wanted to run a drive pedal really scratchy and bright, tends to soften the extremes of the eq.

But that's all just a hypothetical, I've never ran compression after drive because practically, I've never seen the point.

builttospill

Great replies all!

ESBlonde

Compressor after everything for me on my main board. Only subtle use that way.

My rehearsal rig (carrier bag of bits) has an MXR Dyna comp which I run last in the chain too, but that is a lot more aggressive in ratio and attack and isn't 'always on'.

Seziertisch

Depends on the compressor. In terms of handling a hot input signal I haven’t come across anything that touches the API Tranzformer. It always feels like it has more headroom in reserve. By comparison a regular MXR/Dynacomp circuit will reach its limit fairly quickly depending on what you use before it.

Jonathanthomas83

Before for me.